What is price scraping?

How to use a price scraper and increase e-commerce profits 

1.- Identify your competition 

The first step in obtaining information from a price scraper is pinpointing competitors. Start by identifying other e-commerce sites or brands that sell products that are the same or similar to yours, and that constitute direct competitors. Then consider companies that offer substitute products, those items that, while different, can replace yours if buying trends change, such as butter and margarine. Once identified, the domains of these competitors will be introduced into the tracking software to begin data extraction. 

2.- Collect information of interest 

Today’s price scrapers allow you to automatically obtain price, promotion, and stock information from your competitors daily, in any country in the world. In turn, they not only analyse the e-commerce site of the indicated competitor, but they also collect data about their prices on marketplaces such as Amazon or eBay, on B2B portals or price comparison sites such as Idealo, or even automatically identify products in Google Shopping. In addition, it is possible to extract shipping costs and lead times from each of these sales channels, for each competitor. 

The most powerful price scrapers can generate a price history that will help businesses understand how their competitors respond to changes in demand and user trends, and how they adjust prices according to seasonality.

3.- Analyse and export data 

This last step reveals the greatest value of these tools.  The data collected will be presented to the e-commerce business in a simple way, to speed up and optimise decision-making. Through interactive graphs it is possible to quickly assess any data relevant to strategic decision-making, from competitors’ gross margins, to how they apply dynamic prices to their products and services. 

As an added benefit, some more advanced price scrapers include the functionality to export data in different formats for use in presentations or studies, both internally within the company and externally. 

Minderest obtains product, price and stock information using price scraping. Incorporating this resource into the day-to-day e-commerce business can greatly help pricing strategy management, and adapting to the market’s needs at every moment. Given the speed with which the online market expands, new stores open every day and compete with one’s own. As a first step, trust a team of pricing experts to advise you on how to start monitoring your competition based on the characteristics and objectives of your e-commerce business.